Annie Denton Cridge’s Healthy Utopia: The Associative Underpinnings of “Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It?”

ABSTRACT In 1870, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly published the first number of Annie Denton Cridge’s utopian novel entitled “Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It?” Scholars have traditionally characterized Cridge’s story as a work of early feminist writing. However, they have overlooked Cridge’s connection to the American Associationist movement, a utopian-socialist movement inspired by the writings of French philosopher, Charles Fourier. Cridge and her husband were inspired by Fourier and the work of American Associationists as early as the 1850s. While many scholars argue that the Associative movement crumbled in the 1850s, Cridge’s story demonstrates that the movement’s ideas and converts persisted even after the Civil War. Furthermore, Cridge’s story appeared decades before Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and featured aspects of communal life that became mainstays in later utopian literature such as cooperative housekeeping. This article’s characterization of Cridge’s story as an Associative work of fiction encourages us to consider the myriad ways in which Americans took part in utopian-socialist movements, and urges further investigation into the influence that the Associative movement had on the utopian literary tradition in America.